SSPXnews & events

A must read: I Accuse the Council

Have you ever read this classic critique of Vatican II by Archbishop Lefebvre?

Image above: Archbishop Lefebvre with some members of the Coetus Patrum Internationalis in 1962, which was formed to resist the liberal hijacking of the Second Vatican Council.

The AP blog recently published some extracts from Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's work, I Accuse the Council!, which examines the problems of Vatican II (1962-1965) and its post-conciliar implementation:

In the discussions which appear in these pages, nothing less than the Catholic Faith and the future of so-called Christian nations is at stake. Those who worked to disarm the truth and surrendered it to error bear a heavy responsibility.

This book is a must-read for any serious Catholic wishing to better understand the Modernist crisis and the most-common pervading liberal errors (particularly in the political sphere) and the solution for returning to the sanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

We offer below some excerpts from the Angelus Press blog.

Excerpts from I Accuse the Council!

Why is this book called I Accuse the Council? We have chosen this title because we are justified in asserting—a judgment based on both internal and external criticism—that the spirit which dominated the Council and which inspired so many of its ambiguous, equivocal and even clearly erroneous texts, was not that of the Holy Ghost, but the spirit of the modern world, the spirit of Liberalism, of Teilhard de Chardin, of Modernism, in opposition to the kingdom of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Submission to the official reforms and orientations coming from Rome is demanded and imposed in the name of that Council. The tendency of all of these, it will be noted, is openly Protestant and Liberal.

It is only since the Council that the Church, or at least churchmen in possession of key posts, has taken a direction definitely opposed to Tradition and to the official Magisterium of the Church.

Such men have imagined themselves to be the living Church, and mistress of the truth, with freedom to impose new dogmas advocating progress, evolution, change, and a blind, unconditional obedience on clergy and laity alike. They have turned their backs on the true Church; they have given her new institutions, a new priesthood, a new form of worship, new teachings ever in search of something fresh, and always in the name of the Council.

(...)

It is imperative, therefore, to shatter the myths which have been built up around Vatican II. This Council had wished to be a pastoral Council because of its instinctive horror for dogma, and to facilitate the official introduction of Liberal ideas into Church texts. By the time it was over, however, they had dogmatized the Council, comparing it with that of Nicaea, and claiming that it was equal, if not superior, to the Councils that had gone before it!

(...)

We are left with only one solution: to abandon these dangerous examples and cling firmly to tradition, i.e., to the official Magisterium of the Church throughout two thousand years.